Hi Barbara, Thanks for sharing this teaching experience. You are right about getting too many suggestions or opinions. What you might want to do is to solicit their opinions or input but use a forced choice format. This way they have to respond to several options that you present to them rather than they going all over the place with their own opinions. Also, this format keeps them focused on the topics that you want to cover and the questions that result will be on that content. Example-maybe you want to give the students the choice of discussing course content in four areas. They could rank the four areas and then you start with the top ranked one. This way they will have had input but you have contained their choices to the content area that you need to cover to meet the course goals. Gary